Rate Your Students

Rate Your Students is a weblog started in November 2005 by a "tenured humanities professor from the South." The site is now run by a group of professors, all anonymous.

In an article from the Arizona State Web Devil, one of many that appeared on the site, the original moderator said that the impulse to start the blog was:

"to poke fun at RateMyProfessors.com, a mostly unmonitored and disingenuous site that traffics mostly in character assassination. Often I've heard people raise the notion of, 'What if there was a Rate My Students? Wouldn't people be horrified to find out how awful some students can be?' And I thought I'd do it as a lark. I suspected it'd be fun for a couple of weeks and then I'd ditch it. But the response was great, and very quickly the e-mail I was getting was about other things: how to make classrooms work better, what students need to succeed, what professors need to know about the modern student. So my goal became to offer a public forum where interested parties can talk about these things."

The site received much national press in early 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. both weighed in: "For some professors who have had to cringe at scathing personal attacks posted by students on RateMyProfessors.com, a new blog — Rate Your Students — is providing a bit of catharsis."

But some college newspapers were dismissive, including the Cavalier Daily, the weekly student newspaper at the University of Virginia, where one editor wrote:

"Rate Your Students[1] exists for no serious reason. After perusing the site for 20 minutes or so, I was shocked and disappointed with the immature content I found. These professors are substituting mockery for the constructive communication that should be taking place. Rather than create an elitist Web site where students are depicted as rude, iPod-sporting somnambulists, professors should advocate a better response to students' desire for information about their future professors -- a desire that stems more from insecurity than apathy."

External links

• Rate Your Students
• Professors Even the Score - from Harvard Crimson
• Teacher Blog Rates Students - from The Daily Free Press (Boston)
• Thornton, Maggie (2006-01-27). "Professor Creates Site to Criticize Students". Cavalier Daily. Archived from the original on 2008-08-28. http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:S56-HWbx-ycJ:www.cavalierdaily.com/CVArticle.asp%3FID%3D25595%26pid%3D1384+Professor+Creates+Site+to+Criticize+Students+site:cavalierdaily.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a. 
• Prof's Ills Find Home in Blog - from News Observer (Raleigh)
• Professor's Site Mocks Rate My Professors - from Penn State Daily Collegian
• Rate Your Students - from Inside Higher Ed
• Hot for Teacher - from Village Voice
• Turning the Table on Students - from New York Times